Linux memory manager and your big data - <AUTHOR> http://citusdata.com/blog/72-linux-memory-manager-and-your-big-data <comment><USER2> A "50/50" rule such as the one described is a clear signal that the memory manager's cache eviction policy is an ad-hoc hack. This sort of problem would benefit from some old-fashioned operations research-style statistical and mathematical modeling. What's the probability that a page will be needed? What's the cost of keeping it around? A proper model would be able to answer these questions. A "recency cache" and "frequency cache" is missing the bigger picture.

<comment><USER3> > What's the probability that a page will be needed? What's the cost of > keeping it around?

The answer is pretty simple: It depends. What's your workload? There's no general answer.

So, Linux picked a heuristic. They could probably have picked a better one, but short of some sort all knowing of machine learning algorithm which can predict future workloads, the heuristic they pick will be suboptimal in some regard.

<comment><USER4> > _The answer is pretty simple: It depends. What 's your workload? There's no > general answer._

Which is, ironically, an argument for microkernels. In some microkernel designs you could, in principle, allow for applications to provide their own disk and memory managers.

<comment><USER3> To a degree. Both memory and disk bandwidth are shared resources. It's hard to prevent one algorithm from stomping on another without giving it exclusive control. So while you may be able to swap in a memory manager that doesn't have this pathological case, it might negatively affect other applications.

To give an extreme example, imagine that an application sets up a custom memory manager that takes all available RAM, and makes it exclusive to that application. In reality, it would probably be less insane, but you would still get regressions with multiple memory managers. And if you decide you have to have one true memory manager... you're back to the situation that exists today, only potentially slightly easier to configure away from bad behavior.

<comment><USER4> Definitely, but my argument is that OSes must account for the shared-server case, but in practice many servers are dedicated to a single service.

Supposing you built a memory manager exclusively tuned for PostgreSQL, with the assumption that it has the machine to itself. That memory manager would have a different performance profile from the kind of "veil of ignorance" that a general-purpose memory manager has to cope with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder if they could have worked around the issue by doing a mmap() on the first file followed by reading it in, then letting the workload on it finish, followed by calling madvise(..., ..., MADV_DONTNEED) and then doing the same for the second file afterwards.

Obviously the kernel fix is the right thing to do but until that's vetted may be something like the above can help.

<comment><AUTHOR> For the simple wc example we used in the blog post, that could have worked. (We used this wc example to reduce the problem to its simplest form.)

In practice tough, we use PostgreSQL, and we don't have any control over how Postgres reads its pages. So for our customers, we'd still have this problem.

<comment><USER5> Ah. I had a feeling that would be the case! It's never that simple in The Real Life(TM) :)

Postgres could do this though if they detect broken kernel version and the right workload and many users might auto benefit from that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Would something like an adaptive replacement cache, where there are two caching mechanisms (LRU & LFU) but one list, help mitigate this?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_replacement_cache](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_replacement_cache)

<comment><AUTHOR> If ARC could be implemented in an efficient manner, it would. I'm guessing integrating these algorithms into existing kernel code is no small feat though.

Also, ARC may need to be tweaked so that its cost doesn't become prohibitive. That's one reason why the current memory manager isn't using LRU, but an approximation of it: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_replacement_algorithm#Leas...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_replacement_algorithm#Least_recently_used)

<comment><USER7> ZFS uses an ARC.

<comment><USER8> Indeed, and ZFS has quite a high CPU overhead. There's always tradeoffs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The post says kernel versions newer than 2.6.31. Did this happen on older versions as well?

<comment><AUTHOR> My understanding is that it didn't.

Prior to 2.6.31, the kernel simply used two lists. New pages were brought into the recency list, and if they were referenced for a second time, these pages were promoted to the frequency list.

Similarly, if the recency list needed more memory, pages in the frequency list were demoted to it (giving these pages a second chance), and eventually removed from the cache.

In 2.6.31, a change was checked in to better handle cases such as nightly backups evicting interactive user program data. With this change, the frequency list's minimum size was fixed, and if the size dropped down to 50%, pages were no longer demoted from it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think an assessment of how Windows would perform here is appropriate.

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's my high level understanding of how Windows handles this.

Windows uses a set of LRU lists to manage its page cache, where each LRU list corresponds to a priority. In its simplest form then, your pages are evicted according to an LRU eviction policy.

Now, the user can also set priorities on their processes. Let's say they set priority #2. The pages referenced by this process are then inserted into the corresponding LRU cache #2. When a page needs to be evicted from the cache, the LRU list with the lowest priority is consulted first (LRU cache #0), and entries are evicted from it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> So let's get this right. We want to use wc -l to count how many lines there are in a file? and we're using this to benchmark the Linux VM?

The only thing I will say is; stop beating up your hard drives asking them to read the whole file and count how many lines there are in it. Use what the filesystems provide already.

stat -c%s filename

Benchmarking with wc -l is filled with problems; and this article is unfortunately has more flaws than this but I'll stop now.

<comment><USER12> The article wasn't about how to get the size of a file. It was about how linux caches large files. The article just used wc -l as a simple way of loading the entire file into memory.

<comment><USER13> Ignoring that, stat -c%s gives the size of the file in bytes, not a count of newlines.

It's always funny to see how the wrong are often so cocksure.

<comment><USER14> Actually, I'm a little baffled how someone who knows about stat has such an odd idea about how files work.

How could you possibly know how many newline characters are in a file without looking in the file?

<comment><USER11> Unless you disable this; ext filesystems normally store this and can be pulled out of 'stat' easily. Sure you can read the whole file and count every line; or you can trust what the filesystem's metadata says it is.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


In case you weren't convinced that "rockstar" has jumped the shark - <AUTHOR> http://www.flickr.com/photos/rbowen/sets/72157605257536663/

<comment><USER2> Professions you might want a rockstar for:

Programmer, salesman, designer, ice road trucker.

Ones you don't:

Drawbridge operator, actuary, forklift driver, mortician.</comment>


Ask HN: What tool do you use for managing non-technical projects? - <AUTHOR>

I have been looking for a decent non-technical group project management tool for years but still been unsatisfied. What do you use?
I am most interested in how to manage projects like launching a new product, server migration, designing a new marketing strategy, or hiring a design department. There are many great tools like Trac and Redmine for managing programming projects but afaik the same does not exist for non-technical projects.
Here is what I am looking for in project management software. Feel free to add your own requirements.
1. Tasks to be done, with deadlines
2. Important events during the lifetime of the project
3. Visualizations like Gantt charts to track the progress of the project, but aren't critical.
4. Tracking staff resources assigned to the project
5. Managing documents related to the project, like meeting notes, contracts, Service Level Agreements, etc.
6. Easy for truly non-technically inclined staff to use
At my past organization, a tiny non-profit, we used redmine for managing non-technical projects. It was functional but far from ideal. I now work for a giant multinational and there is still a tremendous need for a good, easy-to-use project management app. <comment><USER2> I have almost completely migrated project management tasks to Basecamp, but if Gantt charts were important/needed for me (I used to generate them) I would go back to using <http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omniplan/> it is OSX based, but has worked very well for me. There are a couple video tutorials on the site I suggest watching to get a feel for whether or not you'd enjoy using the software.

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> can you comment on how well basecamp has worked for you and what kind of projects you have used it for?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> There's the very famous Basecamp (<http://basecamphq.com/>) by 37signals. No gantt charts though. If you buy 37signals' argument that effective project management is about communication and not planning then you won't really need them.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree that gantt charts aren't critical but I do think that planning is pretty darn important esp. when your staff is not entirely composed of well- organized self-starters</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How can I fight climate change by writing code? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Because of the age old warning about premature optimization, a lot of software that runs critical parts of the internet infrastructure is dreadfully slow. You could pick something that is deployed on millions of servers, speed it up 20%, and the win would be significant.

An example is the progress bar used in `npm` during install operations. Someone discovered that it was extremely wasteful of resources. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10974929](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10974929)

Little things like that add up. You could do even more by focusing on optimizing overall resource usage rather than just wall clock time. Perhaps even write software to automatically optimize others' software.

You want to find a community that is open to change and optimization, though - some maintainers are too busy or are afraid of change.

</comment><comment><USER3> Support and advocate work-from-home / remote work.

This could mean convincing your employer / your clients to switch to a permanent work-from-home policy (and helping them to implement that policy) or creating software that enables people to work remotely.

</comment><comment><USER4> 'sudo shutdown now' could save some energy. Unless you can work with the countries causing the real damage, then it's mostly going to make you feel good and not really help.

</comment><comment><USER5> Using a programming language with a better carbon footprint. Go native as much as you can.

Assembly, C, C++, Rust are some examples.

JavaScript, Python and other interpreted or GC languages require more power.

<comment><USER4> This is a very subjective idea and is not always true. Ymmv

<comment><USER5> It's extensively tested on various benchmarks and the programming languages I've mentioned are the best performing, based on electricity consumption.

<comment><USER4> Ymmv. Use what's right for your program. Having to download and run an application for something you can do in a second in a browser or terminal isn't saving power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How about some indirect ways? This is what I've done.

Use the money you make to decrease your carbon footprint: Operating an electric car, buying or building a net-zero home, etc. Work from home. Get involved in local government.

</comment><comment><USER7> A guide on how deep learning and IoT could save civilization: [https://hacktheplanet.substack.com/p/pulling-the-climate- swi...](https://hacktheplanet.substack.com/p/pulling-the-climate-switch)

<comment><USER8> Hey!Thanks for sharing a link to my (new) blog. As I'm still in very early stages, I'm trying to capture as much feedback as possible -- if you would be so inclined, I would love to hear any of your thoughts / reflections on either the topic or my writing on firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Find a job at a company that is in the wind or solar industry writing software for them.

</comment><comment><USER10> Use a pencil.

<comment><USER11> I'm curious if this is actually used less energy. Compared to buying a new computer, it's clearly better.

But given that someone most likely already owns a computer, does the marginal amount of energy required to operate the computer exceed the energy impact of extracting resources/manufacturing/transporting pencil and paper?

<comment><USER4> If they have a computer, they likely already have stationary and pens.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you see privacy on Internet ? - <AUTHOR> Can internet privacy be ever achieved? It looks to me as only a small subset of people actually care about their data online. In future people are going to be more concerned about privacy or they would never ? I would like to know views of fellow HNers about privacy. <comment><USER2> Privacy is almost non-existant. When you can be video/audiorecorded anywhere and that information posted up on Youtube without question to share with the world, how is there privacy? When all of your bank's data, your government records, and eventually your health records can be accessed by more and more people, where is the privacy? If your friends and family post pictures of you up on Facebook and tell of your latest deeds without your permission, when they would certainly not call all of your friends and family on the phone to tell them those things, where is the privacy?

The question I think that is more relevant is how we should try to protect ourselves and what we should try to protect in the coming years.

It would be one thing if all data were raw and public, but people can take all of that data and alter it or put a spin on it to fabricate a reality much more convincing and much more easily year-by-year as we share more data and technology advances.

So the answer can't be that their should be no attempt at privacy, but at the same time, we all have to embrace the fact that we basically have no true protection anymore. We are wide open and the only way to keep from getting hurt is to live outside of that world, something I'm not sure is possible anymore.

<comment><AUTHOR> The one big question that comes to mind is, privacy issues are worse with bigger companies. I am more worried about Google or Facebook using my data then any smaller company and at the same time they provide such great services 'free' that I just can't help using them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Privacy does not exist on the internet -

Usernames, IP addresses, email, and WHOIS information link multiple accounts on the internet up to one identity.

Mentions of people, places, activities, interests help create an accurate profile of a user that can match them up with other online accounts.

Even those who forgo non anonymous online personalities can be found through a subpoena of an access log.

Edit: To add - OP's Name, Picture, Email, Address, Domain Names, Telephone Number, etc can be found through this methodology.

</comment><comment><USER4> Privacy began to quickly wilt away with the widespread use of credit cards and cell phones. Both of these allow for us to be tracked via spending and calls (now with apps and gps in phones).

But, we've always had phone books, directory assistance, and the US census. 72% of the national population in both 2000 and 2010 filled out the first form, not including the second form, and not including the door to door.

In many ways, the privacy issues that companies like Google and Facebook are dealing with were instigated decades, or even centuries earlier. Each step has met resistance, always has become the norm in a few years. I expect this recent privacy wave will be similar. We could've opted out intrusive things many, many years ago but, as a society, we have not done so.

</comment><comment><USER5> It depends on how you define internet privacy.

If you mean individual awareness and a person's concern for the security of their data on the Internet, I think that we're in a better place than 10 years ago, but there's still a long way to go.

I think the actual privacy and protection of data runs contrary to the way Internet collaboration is heading, at the individual, group, company and governmental level. The Internet is such a good tool for information exchange, it seems weird to restrict the exchange of that information. But restrict we must, for when we fail to effectively do so, bad shit happens(tm).

But don't worry, PCI DSS will solve everything. A vendor told me so it must be true ;)</comment>


Jean Bartik: the untold story of a remarkable ENIAC programmer - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/12/jean-bartik-untold-story-of-remarkable.html <comment><USER2> Pity this one didn't get more attention.</comment>


A tiny introduction to the 'cut' command - <AUTHOR> http://lessartmorematter.com/blog/1311450341/cut

<comment><USER2> Between cat, cut, grep, sort, join, uniq, tr, and awk there is so much data processing one can do with text files if only one has:

      1. some text files to process,
      2. the patience to read through their man and info pages,
      3. and a healthy appreciation of unix philosophy.

For learning awk at the highest level, the man page will not be enough, and I suggest reading this book: [http://www.amazon.com/AWK-Programming-Language- Alfred-Aho/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/AWK-Programming-Language-Alfred- Aho/dp/020107981X)</comment>


AT&T blacks out HBO, Cinemax for Dish, Sling TV users over carriage dispute - <AUTHOR> https://www.telecompaper.com/news/atandt-blacks-out-hbo-cinemax-for-dish-sling-tv-users-over-carriage-dispute--1267375 <comment><USER2> I'm surprised to see AT&T acting so aggressively with its Time Warner purchase so soon. The government argued that the merger would harm consumers and competition. I expected AT&T to wait a year or two before starting to milk extra profits - especially since the DoJ has appealed its loss.

After the merger, AT&T removed HBO from its lower-priced wireless plan, raised wireless prices, raised DirecTV NOW prices, and now this. Frankly, I would have expected a year or two of AT&T saying, "see, nothing bad happened! If anything, we're giving consumers more!" Then a couple years later, "because of inflation, costs, whatever, we're raising prices...it wasn't because of the merger at all!"

It just seems like AT&T decided to forego plausible deniability. And the merger is being appealed to the DC Circuit court. Literally the DoJ argued that AT&T would have, "both the incentive and the ability to raise its rivals' costs and stifle growth of innovative, next-generation entrants that offer attractive alternatives to AT&T/DirecTV's legacy pay-TV model—all to the detriment of American consumers," and that AT&T would have more power in negotiations with competitors. Now they're proving that.

I'm just surprised that AT&T couldn't wait 18 months. 18 months later, the merger wouldn't be on people's minds as much and they could argue that the market had shifted (production costs, more competition from YouTube, whatever). Doing these things so soon makes a really clear cause and effect. Waiting gives you deniability.

<comment><USER3> They don't care. What's anyone going to do?

Nothing. Nobody is going to do a thing about it.

<comment><USER4> Speak for yourself. I vote with my wallet and cut the cord well over 5 years ago.

<comment><USER5> You don't pay a telecommunications company of some variety for broadband access?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am more and more certain that there need to be strict legal blocks to the vertical integration of content production, content distribution, and Internet/network services.

Nobody wins when any of these three can be owned by the same interest.

<comment> ur-whale >I am more and more certain that there need to be strict legal blocks

Sure. More regulation. Just what we need. Well known to solve every problem known to man.

<comment><USER7> I'll agree to the first part of your statement, but I'll correct the last: regulation has solved many, many problems known to man, but not _every_ problem. Let's not be hyperbolic here.

<comment><USER8> I think he was being sarcastic.

<comment><USER7> I've looked at the HN guidelines, but I'm still confused: is it okay to appropriate Slashdot culture here? Because: whoosh.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Honestly, I kind of hope Dish and Sling hold out. I don't have cable any more, but many of my family members do, and constantly complain about rates going up all the time. If enough cable companies toe the line with HBO, and ESPN, it would put a stop to that..

<comment><USER10> Dish/Dish Network/Sling/Echostar have been involved in these carriage disputes on and off over the decades. The CEO doesn't willingly give into price hikes and unilateral changes without a fight. He'll just switch the network off (or let it get cut off) and apply the viewer pressure until something is worked out.

2018, Univision: [https://www.multichannel.com/news/ergen-univision- blackout-i...](https://www.multichannel.com/news/ergen-univision-blackout-is- probably-permanent)

2017, CBS: [https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/dish-network-drops- cb...](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/dish-network-drops-cbs-stations- contract-dispute-1060631)

2016, Viacom: [https://deadline.com/2016/04/viacom-dish-network-resolve- car...](https://deadline.com/2016/04/viacom-dish-network-resolve-carriage- dispute-1201741471/)

2012, AMC: [https://www.npr.org/2012/09/13/161019358/wheres-my-amc- dish-...](https://www.npr.org/2012/09/13/161019358/wheres-my-amc-dish-network- dispute-drags-on)

2010, Weather Channel: [https://www.reuters.com/article/industry-us-dish- weatherchan...](https://www.reuters.com/article/industry-us-dish- weatherchannel-idUSTRE64J6X320100520)

2010, Disney: [https://technology.ihs.com/402822/disney-dish-spat-the- battl...](https://technology.ihs.com/402822/disney-dish-spat-the-battle-over- hd-carriage-premiums-is-underway)

Full list: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Dish_Network#Prog...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Dish_Network#Programming_disagreements)

Granted, the landscape has changed and it's a lot easier to change streaming providers than the old days when you had to physically switch out your satellite system for DirecTV or go back to CATV/Cable.

<comment><USER11> I once have sat at the war room table in such a dispute. Typically a carrier has a weapon which it can use abet reluctantly ( because it can only be used once every few years ) -- it is dropping the multiple channels associated with the content provider. Since typically a carrier has a local monopoly on access, such drop impacts cash flow of the content provider, which needs the cash flow to create new content.

The problem is that this weapon does not work against AT&T which owns DirectTV -- Dish would need to drop _all_ AT&T controlled content a the worst possible time for AT&T - such as right before the elections ( CNN would take a major hit ) as well as channels such as TBS/TNT/etc, which may not be possible due to other contracts while betting that AT&T's campaign to switch Dish users to DirectTV won't be successful ( it will - there's really no difference between the two providers it is just a question of AT&T having the installation operation ready )

Dish is a dinosaur of the carriers - it has too many channels and no content to put on it. Its only long term play is heavy investment in creating its own programming. Even Netflix and Amazon realized it.

<comment><USER10> I always considered RFDTv to be Dish's original programming... =)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> AT&T heavily subsidizes HBO for TV and telecom subscribers. $5 with DTV Now or free with AT&T Unlimited plan.

They are definitely playing long game if they're willing to lose 2.5 million Dish subscribers. HBO makes about $8 per sub from cable companies, so $20m per month. They are probably trying to push it up to their OTT price ($15).

People can still subscribe to HBO Now. Mildly annoying to get it from a separate interface or you have bad internet, but at least there are options.

<comment><USER13> Is HBO Now good these days? Last time I used it, it was _terrible_.

<comment><USER14> You can also subscribe through Amazon and watch through whatever Amazon Prime app you use.

<comment><USER15> Not really any better of an experience than the HBO Now app, IMO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It is time to break up AT&T. Their abuse of HBO customers on Dish network is an outrage. Senators and Cobgressman from rural districts need to band together, regardless of party and work together to break up AT&T. I know that as of today I will never consider switching to DirectTV and I'm going to take a long look at switching phone and internet carriers. Hey Hey Ho Ho AT&T must go! Seriously though, the fact that AT&T can get away with this is just another sign that our government is in steep decline!

</comment><comment><USER17> Prefix: Speaking generally, with regard to "blackouts" impacting immediate and short-term, essentially already sold and "committed to" services.

Pertaining to this instance, that would include taking on and honoring the contracts and commitments already made by your acquisition.

\--

Here's an idea: Regulation that says the moment they do such, they have to discount all impacted customers' billing by the amount represented by these services.

And, up the food chain, the other parties lose their corresponding revenue. No grace period, no exceptions. Every hour of blackout costs them, for what they are not providing on the packages they've sold customers.

I'd also argue for an additional penalty assessment for lack of notice to customers of service change.

When it starts costing them all money, negotiations may go a bit more smoothly and willingly -- and planfully.

"But, contracts!"

Commercial contracts face all sorts of legal limitations. This proposal seems a pretty simple and purposeful limitation, that is overdue.

\--

P.S. Once it's coded into their systems, it can be generalized. Failed Internet connectivity? Discount! Missed service call? Discount!

In other words, stop them from externalizing the costs of poor support. (Which they can do all the more readily in the absence of effective competition, a known issue here in the U.S.)

P.P.S. You can also see the pressure/incentive this situation provides, for customers to move to online streaming over a neutral carrier (if they can get it), for such programming -- including access at time of release as opposed to through an archive.

<comment><USER18> ATT didn't sell it; Dish and sling did, and I'm pretty sure customers aren't going to continue paying for HBO while it's blacked out. I don't understand your approach at all.

<comment><USER17> My fault, for reacting more to another headline about "blackouts", than to the specifics. I've tried to clarify, a bit, in my original comment.

Customers make commitments, both contractual and personal in terms of time and effort and availability, to media distribution purchases. I think they have a right to receive the product they paid for. If that product fails or changes substantially, they have a right to recompense -- to a corresponding adjustment, at least.

They get jerked around by the big media companies: Programming and distribution.

Make those companies absorb the costs of their own machinations and failures, instead of passing them on -- financially and otherwise -- to relatively captive customers.

<comment><USER18> I still don't understand why ATT would pay anything here. Dish customers aren't going to be paying for HBO any longer (until it returns), and this sort of logic would never allow any supplier to raise their prices.

Let's say I'm a lumber supplier and happen to be the only supplier in the world capable of manufacturing AwesomeWood. I want to raise my prices, but some contractor/land owner decides they won't pay. But they really like AwesomeWood. Does the manufacturer now owe the contractor/land owner compensation? Seems silly.

<comment><USER17> Speaking generally (not to this specifically): Cable company offers customer package that has X. Then gets into dispute with provider or distributor of X -- a pricing fight -- and X goes away. Customer keeps paying for the package they were sold.

Again, speaking generally, if cable company had to, hour one, cut customer's bill by the portion that X represents. If, in other cases where provider/distributor of X is still getting paid essentially out of customer's pocket for X, that too has to stop.

Maybe these sudden blackouts would go away.

In this case, as I understand it, ATT bought HBO. ? -- I can't even keep up with all the mergers, anymore; that kind of rings a bell.

Suddenly, a couple of months later, pricing/contract dispute makes HBO go away for these customers. They should get a discount on their packages, and I'd love to see ATT eat it for not honoring the relationship HBO had with these downstream providers and providing some continuity.

At least in this case, if they have decent high speed internet (Sling at least implies this, for part of them), they can get HBO through another avenue. Does HBO stream directly, now? I know you can subscribe to their... "channel"?, addon?, through Amazon Prime video and presumably (without requiring eating the $120/year cost for Prime) through Amazon video.

In other cases, customers may not have such a ready, easy option for alternative access. No high speed internet (Dish customers, maybe). Or content that doesn't stream (some sports). And this lack of options all the more so, in past but still recent and relevant years.

In many cases, due to lack of options, or to one-time cost and time barriers (getting another physical distribution channel set up, if one's even available), customer subscription choices are significantly "sticky".

Every time these big media companies "fight it out", with blackouts and such, they are imposing costs on those customers. Costs they can externalize, because customers are "stuck" with them in a marketplace that is severely lacking in effective competition.

Finally, that lack may be lessening -- IF those customers have access to adequate, affordable, and neutral data delivery. Something that remains untrue or under threat, for many customers.

Anyway, I hope I made some sense, here.

As for me, I spent 16 years with only one high-speed Internet option, because the one competitor in this area chose not to repair or replace the ancient and degraded copper line along my back lot line. And that was after they received approximately 750 million in tax breaks and other... "gifts", I have to call them, from the state, in return for a commitment to deploy "universal" high speed Internet access to the entire state (with a little wiggle room for hard to reach areas) -- years prior. A commitment they promply reneged on and spent money lobbying to get out of.

That was what is now called ATT, by the way.

So here, I see another instance of their shafting customers, because they can.

Make them pay. Nothing else works -- well, there's been no effective political will to throw their executives in prison, yet. (Were there, I'm not entirely dubious that criminal activity could be found in some of their behavior.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> AT&T continues to act like an old dinosaur with it's crude business tactics, shady telecom deals/mergers and practices. Why hurt customers? This looks bad regardless who's right.

<comment><USER11> Dish/Sling are not AT&T customers. They are the middleman that prevents AT&T from having a direct access to the customers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Those are all luxury entertainment products. No one actually needs them, and hopefully a temporary black out will remind viewers that they can live just fine without that video content.

<comment><USER21> Well, in a past career I worked in film/TV. I needed them. This is an industry like any other. It employs lots of people. Things like blackouts and, in my day, writers strikes impact the livelihoods of a great many.

Now facebook, _that_ is pure luxury that we can all do without. And don't get me started on air travel. Get out and walk. Take a train.

<comment><USER22> I don't think you want to compare industries and determine the importance by the number of workers.

Facebook is trying to be a content platform for everything. If it had it's way, it would be YouTube++. To be locked out of YouTube these days would be pretty bad if you wanted to be a vlogger. And Air Travel is pretty critical for remote towns in America. Train isn't really competitive for cross america travel in terms of time even if we have to put up with all the security theater.

<comment><USER21> Read the post again. Take it a little less literally. Do you really thing that I meant that people should literally walk instead of flying? I was saying that the OP's description of the film/TV industry as a "luxury" and that people should "get outside" was just as ridiculous as my description of Facebook or air travel. This is a tech forum. I was illustrating the point by re-telling the narrative in terms more understood to this crowd, with the hope that doing so would create some empathy in the minds of readers. But of course this is HN where metaphor is too complex a concept.

For the Sheldon out there: When you see someone equate two wildly different things, such as FLYING and WALKING, that is code for _not literal_ and you should examine the wording in context. There is probably another meaning, one often opposite to that literally described by the text. And if you don't understand what I mean by "Sheldons" then I give up.

Wow, that was too much typing. It is almost like metaphor allow us to express complex ideas with far fewer words than literal description of the facts. I wonder if anyone else has discovered this trick?

<comment><USER22> Re-reading and honestly. I just don't think your response to thread OP was clear in the way you have imagined it.

You mention walking vs flying as an appeal to extremes, but you dropped in trains right after. That takes away from your point at the critical moment. And your Facebook as a luxury comparison just doesn't really get your point across. It's not like you told me to sell my children to fix my financial troubles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > The spokerperson said until a resolution is found, customers should look for > other ways to access HBO.

Do you want piracy? This is how you get piracy.

<comment><USER24> I would have dropped the price of HBO Go to half and remove the cable requirement for Sling and AT&T.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is the kind of behavior that drives cord cutting. Unacceptable IMO.

<comment><USER7> _This is the kind of behavior that drives cord cutting_

And drives them right into the arms of the HBO Now $15/month plan. Oh, yeah, cord-cutters have 'em so torn up at HBO, they're crying rivers of gold bars over there.

<comment><USER26> Theyre already on it [https://www.keepmyhbo.com/](https://www.keepmyhbo.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > AT&T acquired HBO when it bought Time Warner for USD 85.4 million

Holy crap, I didn't know this. That seems like absolute peanuts.

Edit: As pointed out, the article dropped a factor of 1000. Mildly infuriating, to the say the least. I guess they pointed it out at the end of the article, shame on me then.

<comment><USER28> That should be 85.4 billion. Seems like a misprint.

<comment><USER27> [https://money.cnn.com/2018/06/12/media/att-time-warner- rulin...](https://money.cnn.com/2018/06/12/media/att-time-warner- ruling/index.html)

Yep, just looked it up to verify, I thought it was fishy as hell. Shame on the original article, that's such a silly misprint.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This kind of dispute between content providers and content distributors happens all the time.

Comcast - Disney - AT&T - Nextstar - Sinclair, etc... It's an everlasting dance that's been doing on for decades.

The only reason this is interesting to the HN community is because it's happening to Sling. But if Sling wants to play on the level of Scripps, Gannet, etc... it has to play by those rules, and expect these sorts of things to happen.

I'm not saying AT&T is right here. But I witnessed at least a dozen of these temporary content blackouts in my previous life in broadcasting. Just because your TV company doesn't have towers doesn't mean you get a free pass.

<comment><USER30> No, it doesn't happen all the time. In fact the article is quite clear that this never happened with HBO before the merger.

And also no, Sling being included is not the only reason this is interesting. It's interesting because it's a major telco using their newly acquired content as an anticompetitive bludgeon, in direct violation of their quite recent promises to the contrary.

<comment><USER29> _No, it doesn't happen all the time._

Yes, it does. You are correct that this is the first dispute between HBO and Sling. But as I stated, this _type_ of dispute between content creators and content distributors happens all the time.

Welcome to professional broadcasting. So much for the SV "disruption" strategy.

<comment><USER31> It's more than that it's the first between HBO and _anyone._ Plus it occurred right after a merger with one of slings competitors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> What the hell, I'm paying extra for hbo on dish and it's blocked? AT&T is disgusting, commercials are coming that's what. They ruined hbo.

<comment><USER20> So quit watching HBO. Problem solved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Oh right, I knew there was a reason everyone was terrified when HBO let itself be bought by AT&T.

<comment><USER33> Why would anyone be terrified? You can just go to hbo.com and pay $15 for it.

<comment><USER34> That's probably why AT&T has the upper-hand in this case. People can just stream HBO. This hurts rural customers who don't have reliable internet connections, though.

<comment><USER35> Plus streaming gets counted against data quota.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > We hope you've enjoyed your free articles.

I don't think I've ever been to this site in my life, but they claim I've used up my free articles. Clearing cookies solves this.

</comment><comment><USER36> I cannot wait for cable/sat networks as content providers to come to an end. Everything should be on-demand, leaving the only purpose of cable or sat being live events like sports.

<comment><USER37> I don't see that happening in the near future, at least not until there is ubiquitous 5g coverage that is affordable.

*posting from a place where there's no cell signal and the only internet access available is satellite (the POTS is too noisy for modem connection)

</comment></comment><comment> OpenBSD-reich BitTorrent over Tor (or I2PSnark, which needs more <3) is the superior solution to bad guy big-media. It's free and only needs a minimal amount of patience.

<comment><USER38> Or pay the 9 a month for the content you consume.

<comment><USER39> or use your power as a consumer to vote with your wallet, which is almost always the overall response on HN to someone complaining about a monopoly

it just so happens that it's real easy with content!</comment></comment></comment>


How our heartbeat shapes our thinking [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180423-how-a-s <comment><USER2> I listen to french house or chilled out trance when I'm writing code. I didn't read the article, but I definitely notice that rhythmic lock-in that comes with doing that.

My guys give me shit about it sometimes because I guess I like to rock my shoulders to the music, I don't ever notice it but they call it "catjamming".

Rhythm is a constant in all organic life, I think it plays a very strong role in all of our psychology. I've psyched myself out in chess games by making two fast moves in a row, my whole mental atmosphere blows up and all the shapes and patterns melt into noise and craziness.

At least a zillion times I've been working on some troublesome code and my phone goes and instantly just disconnected from that thought.

Sometimes DJ's throw in abrupt breaks or adlibs, that irks me.

It's all rhythmic, it's just that not all rhythms are measured in simple beats. I have rhythms through the seasons, through a quarter, through a week of inspections or audits, I have a rhythm for when stress in general.

Idk what I'm talking about. I'll read the article now.

<comment><USER3> Would love some recommendations of things I can find on Youtube. I listen to Youtube Red often while working. Anything I can get there would be great. Thanks!

<comment><USER4> This has been picking up steam:

[https://youtu.be/ohQPySWJToo](https://youtu.be/ohQPySWJToo)

<comment><USER5> Had this in a tab already, closed it to open your link. :|

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I noticed many years ago, that the beats-per-minute (BPM) and music intensity (Classic/Thrash) affect my heartbeat/rate and therefore my mood.

Since then, I listen to classic music when I drive, soft piano jazz when I work, and Sepultura before doing sports.

There are plenty of studies/articles that have discussed how music affects heart-rate (and therefore mood). Below you can find two I found worthy of reading.

[1]: [http://spot.colorado.edu/~basey/jthorne.html](http://spot.colorado.edu/~basey/jthorne.html)

[2]: [https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/using- musi...](https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/using-music-to- tune-the-heart)

<comment><USER7> I find this comment very interesting -- am I understanding correctly that you find it easier to notice your heartbeat change than to notice your mood change?

With effort I can barely detect non-drastic changes to my heartbeat -- I am much more readily aware of changes to my mood.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I hate when news organizations don't offer a text version of a story. Video and audio segements are soooo slowwwwwzzzzzz.

<comment><USER9> For noisy sites like BBC, I routinely hit reader view.

And this story made no sense. Huge non sequiturs.

But then. of course. The text is just commentary on the video.

<comment><USER6> I use Adblock+ (v2.9.1) and "Element Hiding Helper for Adblock Plus" (v.1.4)

For the sites I visit frequently, I use the "element hiding.." to block columns/rows, basically stripping the 'noise'. So everytime I click on an article, I have already hidden the 'promoting' boxes/sections/columns.

Edit: adding the links to Firefox addons I use

[1]: [https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/downloads/file/660890/adb...](https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/downloads/file/660890/adblock_plus-2.9.1-an+fx+sm+tb.xpi?src=version- history)

[2]: [https://adblockplus.org/en/elemhidehelper](https://adblockplus.org/en/elemhidehelper)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've got premature ventricular contractions which basically means that every once in a while, my heart goes early and then there's a longer pause.

Being aware of my heart beats basically gave me panic attacks which makes the pvcs worse, which makes my anxiety worse and so on.

I had to work at _not_ noticing my heartbeat, per my cardiologists advice.

<comment><USER11> I have the same issue. My favorite part is the sleepless nights: PVC -> anxiety about PVC -> can't sleep -> extra anxiety about missing sleep -> panic attack.

Anecdotally, daily calcium and magnesium supplements seem to reduce the frequency.

<comment><USER12> I have the same issues. Combined with that I'm hypothyroid, which can then compound the PVC symptoms when my dosage of thyroxine is off.

I'm sitting here reading this article thinking "My gods, I wouldn't wish this on anyone, forget about your heartbeat before it drags you into panic attacks!"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> some research from Sarah N. Garfinkel

* "Fear from the Heart: Sensitivity to Fear Stimuli Depends on Individual Heartbeats" ( 2014) [http://www.jneurosci.org/content/34/19/6573.full](http://www.jneurosci.org/content/34/19/6573.full)

see more: [https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=S.+N.+Garfinkel+heart+e...](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=S.+N.+Garfinkel+heart+emotions)

\--

or article from psychologytoday:

"Listen To Your Heart : How Interoception Shapes Emotional Experiences." (2016) [https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mind- growth/201609/l...](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mind- growth/201609/listen-your-heart)

or

"The science inside our hearts and minds | Dr Sarah Garfinkel | TEDxBrighton" (2018 ) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hI_gG49sV2s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hI_gG49sV2s)

</comment><comment><USER14> I see a lot of discussion here regarding the influence of listening to music but I am also curious about the influence of rhythmic training. This year I added rhythmic training as a warm up to all of my piano students lessons. I've been using an old staple 'Stick Control' (link below) to train the most basic LH/RH coordination and beat perception and have been amazed at the improvement across the board including myself since I work on this with them. I would compare the improved LH/RH coordination with improved conceptualization of a beat to a rising tide that lifts the ships of the beginner, the prodigy, the professional and the senior citizen student.

[https://www.amazon.com/Stick-Control-George-Lawrence- Stone/d...](https://www.amazon.com/Stick-Control-George-Lawrence- Stone/dp/1892764040/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1524667294&sr=8-1&keywords=stick+control)

<comment><USER15> Stick Control is basically fine motor coordination and a bit of limb independence exercises, even if you are not a drummer, practicing stick control will improve your "handling" in any instrument. Or even in unexpected things, for example, while driving, I find heel-toeing very easy and natural (brake with right foot toe, press the clutch with left foot, change gear with right hand while steering with the left hand, rev-match with the right foot heel, let go of the clutch) probably because I've played the drums for almost 22 years now.

In the same note, as a fellow drummer, I can say that drummers that study melodic instruments tend to play their instruments serving the music way better. Piano is probably my second preferred instrument, I've always wanted to learn it, if you can guide to some starting material or equipment, I'd be happy to hear!

<comment><USER14> The only thing I'll add to this is the benefit of working with a metronome. With 88 keys and 10 fingers there is a lot pianists can get distracted by but when you strip it down to RH/LH eighth notes starting at 30 bpm you can really focus on generating a time feel!

A guide you say?! Funny you mention it this is what I've cobbled together for my students over the years. It's about time for me to give it another pass to further refine it but it is a reliable path towards basic keyboard proficiency. Let me know what you think.

[https://docs.google.com/document/d/15UObA9KnJ1Q6Lymz3QBulSFm...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/15UObA9KnJ1Q6Lymz3QBulSFmXTVUrxN2mQ0FPrsc6lo/edit?usp=sharing)

<comment><USER15> Nice! I'll take a look at it!

Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> My therapy involves periods of getting in touch with my body, e.g. tension in my forehead or tightness in my chest, and then as I focus and try to be present with the sensations, words tend to pop into my mind that often yield insights into suppressed feelings and ideas. There's a book that nicely presents the therapy technique named body centered psychotherapy by Ron Kurtz.

I wonder if focusing on ones heartbeat employs the same underlying mechanisms that help self-insights happen.

<comment><USER17> In Buddhist insight meditation, the first of the four foundations of mindfulness is "mindfulness of the body".

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I was both happy but not surprised to see autism pop up in relation to this. I was recently diagnosed and a key part of it is over-sensitivity and misinterpretation of bodily sensations.

I've always been 'overly' aware of my heartbeat and it has caused me distress, but since wearing a Fitbit 24/7 and being able to see that, no, it's not off the scale, things have improved. I guess that's a sort of very lightweight, passive version of what's going on in this research. Beta blockers have also proven to be very efficacious as a way of breaking out of cycles of worry/response.

</comment><comment><USER19> In re: the heart and introspection, I'd like to describe a phenomenon I've encountered during structured meditation / self-hypnosis. Please be advised that this may be dangerous. If you experiment with this please be careful.

Normally, your nervous system adjusts subjective perception to attenuate the sensations of your heart beating (also breathing.) With training and practice it is possible to become consciously aware of the physical fact of the hydrodynamic pulsations that are, have been, and will be a constant feature of your human life. The simplest foot-in-the-door thing to do is to feel your pulse (i.e. put your fingers of one hand on the right spot on the wrist of your other hand) as you enter a hypnotic trance.

The specific phenomenon I want to mention is that, as my consciousness became more and more fully aware of the pulse throughout my body I got closer and closer to "touching my heart with my mind" (I don't know how else to describe it.) The heart and circulatory system experienced from within is an incredible potent living energy flow. It was so deep and intense that I never fully merged with it, instead getting "jerked awake" like when you're dreaming and you start to fall and suddenly wake up instead.

If you experiment please be careful, and whatever you do don't force it: who can say if you might not give yourself some sort of cardiac arrest by wiring up the information flows in your nervous system the wrong way?

I think it's worth pointing out in this connection that Gurdjieff described hypnosis as being caused by a change in the usual pressure of blood flow.</comment>


Doing it wrong: cse in guile - <AUTHOR> http://wingolog.org/archives/2012/05/14/doing-it-wrong-cse-in-guile <comment><USER2> An interesting article. It offers a taste of the many challenges that arise when developing a language implementation. As they say, it's all about tradeoffs.

"…there is very little in the way of correct, current, and universal folk wisdom as to how to implement a programming language."

Hm. I have a mind to fix that.</comment>


How Snowflake Rebuilt Its AWS Stack on Azure - <AUTHOR> https://www.snowflake.com/blog/how-we-built-snowflake-on-azure/ <comment><USER2> >We couldn't have built this without close coordination with Microsoft. The Snowflake on Azure project included many long phone sessions and meetings in Redmond conference rooms. Several new features were built with Snowflake in mind, including Azure storage soft delete and improvements to virtual machine provisioning. A big thank you goes out to the Azure team for helping us deliver together.

Good to know that you need long phone conversations and meetings and Microsoft to roll out special features to get yourself onto Azure. I'm sure they didn't intend it to be this way but not a good look for Microsoft.

<comment><USER3> I don't get this? What would you prefer, that MS azure is not willing/able/available to those who would want to build something on their platform?

Why would you expect them not to be engaged?

If the idea is that you would prefer them to not be required in order to accomplish such a deployment, then maybe azures tech/offering matured such that the next snowflake like company will not need such close support.

Your comment makes no sense to me.

<comment><USER4> Sounds like they'd prefer that the Azure platform is sufficiently functional/comprehensive already so you don't need to ask MS to fix/build things you need.

<comment><USER5> My fear is Azure will build solutions specific for a customer which might never be used by other customers. So that solution is a special case in a homogeneous cloud platform with all its own problems.

For example, I feel I can trust S3 because of its simplicity and the sheer amount of systems depending on the same simple functionality of S3 I am using. If I would get a special feature in S3 just for my use case, there is no guarantee others will use that feature and it will be as battle hardened as the generic features.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Audio ads popping open some helpful cartoon character means I hit the back button and never return.

</comment><comment><USER7> Three! Disclaimers to hide at bottom of page on mobile! That's 3 taps on the X! Jeezus.

</comment><comment><USER8> Does anyone have experience working with Snowflake? I feel like what their promising is too good to be true and their website is extremely lacking in substantive details.

<comment><USER9> We've been using it for a couple years and pretty happy. Every once in a while there is a bug that takes a while to fix, but really it's been pretty great compared to what we were using before.

<comment><USER10> How does it compare to bigquery/redshift (other than multi cloud thing).

<comment><USER11> From my experience, it was pretty speedy even on some (relatively) large datasets. The decoupling of compute and storage makes it appealing compared to Redshift if you have bursty load on your cluster.

<comment><USER9> It was also cheaper for us than Redshift, of course your mileage may vary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is a lot of upfront work, and signing up for continuous maintenance, computing costs, dealing with vendor-specific oddities, and a host of other concerns. Whatever is gained from this (being able to sign AWS phobic clients) must be substantial.

<comment><USER13> There are some large companies that don't want to run on Amazon, so they are probably trying to court that business... but I'm surprised they went with Azure instead of Google.

I wonder if they are trying to get Walmart?

[https://www.foxbusiness.com/features/wal-mart-to-vendors- get...](https://www.foxbusiness.com/features/wal-mart-to-vendors-get-off- amazons-cloud)

 _EDIT_

I don't have to speculate, that's definitely why they went to Azure:

 _Retail clients have pushed Snowflake Computing to make its software available on Microsoft's (NASDAQ:MSFT) Azure cloud._

 _Snowflake CEO Bob Muglia (a Microsoft vet) says that a number of retail customers "particularly a large one based in Arkansas" have "a fairly strong opinion" about the Azure availability._

 _The Arkansas reference is likely to Walmart, which prefers not to use competitor Amazon's cloud._

[https://seekingalpha.com/news/3369703-cloud-data- warehouse-c...](https://seekingalpha.com/news/3369703-cloud-data-warehouse- comes-azure-walmart-pressure)</comment></comment>


Wall St collapse on the Tundra - <AUTHOR> http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/04/iceland200904

<comment><USER2> Previously submitted:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=502906></comment>


Why CSP matters II: How do I know sync works? - <AUTHOR> http://reaktor.com/blog/why-csp-matters-ii-how-do-i-know-sync-works/ <comment><USER2> For anybody who found this interesting, make sure to read his earlier article (which he links to) here: [http://reaktor.com/blog/why-csp-matters-i-keeping- things-in-...](http://reaktor.com/blog/why-csp-matters-i-keeping-things-in- sync/) . It sets up the problem which he then answers in this post.

We've been having a similar issue, where we want to make sure our data syncs correctly. One of our contributors built this ToDoMVC app [http://todos.loqali.com/](http://todos.loqali.com/) (which basically also works for a grocery list app as well), but how do you know it synced correctly? Or more importantly, how do you prove it?

The article is great at addressing this with clojure and and CSP. But it would be nice if we had a generic testing framework (like Jasmine, Mocha, etc. are) for doing this. That is why one of my employees is working on [https://github.com/gundb/panic](https://github.com/gundb/panic) (in development! not working yet!). So far it has been specific to our project, but this next iteration he is splitting it out and making it generic to any project.

You write your test, it gets deployed on a bunch of clients/peers, and then the test coordinator (panic) aggregates the results and confirms if everything ran correctly or not. The cool thing is since your test is deployed across a bunch of peers, you can have the test assert that client1 received an update from client2 - if that never fulfills, then it is considered a "fail". If however, a non-deterministic network hiccup occurs (versus a simulated one in the test), the whole test suite should bail and force you to re-run so you don't get flawed results.

This is really important because it tails off of the work of Kyle Kingsbury ( [https://aphyr.com/](https://aphyr.com/) ) who has sent shockwaves through the database industry with his Call Me Maybe Jepsen series. You want to verify that the system works correctly (and as it claims). So I hope to see more articles like this, as well as more work in this direction. We need tools (like what we are doing with panic) that make this easy and accessible for all developers.</comment>


On the Suitability of RTT Measurements for Geolocation - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/britram/trilateration/blob/master/paper.ipynb <comment><USER2> I wonder if this becomes more feasible if instead of drawing exclusion circles based on speed of light in fiber, you would use a graph of network links. For example the location and length of submarine cables is well known, and there is also somewhat decent information on the location and speed of other backbone links. If a RTT is 500ms, you can walk this graph of known links up to a distance of 250ms, and draw circles around every branching point equivalent to the remaining RTT budget in order to account for unknown links to consumers. That way you end up with a bunch of circles that combined contain all possible locations of the target.

You could even take it a step further with empirical measurements of real delays and variance (based on time of day) between known locations to map unmapped parts of the network and to make educated guesses about the used links based on experienced RTT variance.

I guess it's still hard to get better than an IP database unless the target uses top-notch networking equipment, given that a single ms means 300km difference. But maybe variance of RTT could give enough clues to rule out multiple links, giving you a way to enhance the location estimate from the IP database in some cases.

<comment><USER3> You're largely correct in how you define the probable zone of inclusion. However as latency can always be artificially increased but never decreased, this becomes less useful for excluding 'nearer' entities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It seems to me that an empirical exclusion based method could be used; there appears to be very few points that are close to the green line in their chart.

Alternatively, one could use statistical multilateration. If you have more than 3 points, then you can draw multiple spheres and find an area that has a high likelyhood of being correct.</comment>


Show HN: Saas Ninja – sales, monitoring and development tools for Saas Products - <AUTHOR> Hey HN I'm Daniel, a fullstack developer from Sydney Australia and founder at Saas Ninja (https://saasninja.io/).
Saas Ninja provides a suite of simple tools/APIs on a monthly subscription basis that help Product Teams sell, monitor and develop their Saas Products.
The idea for Saas Ninja came during my last employment contract working for a startup.  We needed a number of monitoring tools for our product and each provider I researched was often over-complicated for what we wanted and was priced more towards a monitoring connoisseur than a startup developer. With looming deadlines and minimal funding, I couldn't justify building them ourselves, yet I also didn't want to pay $40/month every time we needed a new tool. Saas Ninja solves this problem by providing a suite of Sales, Monitoring and Development tools for a single monthly subscription payment.  The tools are all accessible through a standard API which means one integration point, and hopefully means your team can get right back to focusing on core business. My intention is to provide low cost, reliable and basic functionality that is easy to understand and distraction free.  I want to build Saas Ninja up to be the AWS of value-add Sales, Monitoring and Development APIs.
This is my first developer-focused product launch. I've read a lot about how this market is very different so I'm excited to learn as much as I can. Please feel free drop your feedback below or if you have a minute fill out this Google form link (there's only 5 questions): https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfCdmfzNeh2MgnyjPg0...
This is the Public Beta release and all accounts have limited free access to an initial suite of 10 tools for this launch. Please have a look around and hopefully I hear from you soon.
BTW Today also happens to be my 35th birthday ;) <comment><USER2> Happy birthday and congrats on the launch!

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha thank you!..</comment></comment>


Finding a good name for your startup is becoming more difficult each day - <AUTHOR> http://blog.dnominator.com/

<comment><USER2> Mobile-first. Ok. But, besides the great functionality, putting together domai.nr and twitter API, I don't see my self checking my pocket to check startups name.

<comment><AUTHOR> The process of finding a good name can take lots of hours, just browsing the internet and checking if they are available.This app is intended to make this process easier and faster.</comment></comment>


It's SparkFun free day (servers are down) - <AUTHOR> http://www.sparkfun.com/

<comment><USER2> Now _that's_ marketing!

Servers aint down anymore btw.</comment>


Scots language Wikipedia is edited primarily by someone who doesn't know Scots - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/igbbh2/the_scots_language_wikipedia_is_edited_primarily/ <comment><USER2> He genuinely seems like a guy who was just trying to help. You don't get to that scale of edits manually without wanting to help. Reminds me of the Jesus Painting¹. Sometimes, your reach exceeds your grasp, and it's beneficial for society to help you out in these situations. So he made a mistake, but his user page looks like he wasn't malicious. Be kind, go and fix the articles or RFD them.

Treating this guy like some sort of vandal isn't right. To be honest, it doesn't look like there are very many Scots contributors, so perhaps it should just be dumped as a project since it doesn't look like there are many Scots readers either.

EDIT: Ah fortunately, they've been in touch with him³ and he feels awful that he upset people². I am glad there are kind people in the world that know how to help people be contributors.

¹ [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecce_Homo_(Mart%C3%ADnez_and_G...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecce_Homo_\(Mart%C3%ADnez_and_Gim%C3%A9nez,_Borja\))

² [https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/igbbh2/the_sco...](https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/igbbh2/the_scots_language_wikipedia_is_edited_primarily/g2u07oo/)

³ [https://twitter.com/Cobradile94/status/1298321034530246658?s...](https://twitter.com/Cobradile94/status/1298321034530246658?s=20)

<comment><USER3> His first mistake, which should be treated with graciousness and care, was a case of reach exceeding grasp.

His second and bigger mistake was continuing astride for years even after several people expressed concern, told him he doesn't know the language, and explained that his editing was doing real damage to perception of the language.

It's not right to treat him like a vandal, but the second mistake is good cause for being a little bit more forceful and public with the rebuke.

TBH it was a failure of the community to even allow the situation to get this bad.

<comment><USER4> The original Reddit post somewhat overstated the nature of "several people expressed concern." Nobody told him outright that despite what he might think, he did not really know Scots. That one screenshot'd, anonymized conversation was the one time something like that happened in seven years - but that could very easily be read as a criticism of those specific translations, not of his work as a whole. It seems as if the Reddit OP was the first person to notice the editor's systemic incompetence and failure to understand the degree of his lack of fluency. So... no, I don't think he ever made this "second and bigger mistake", aside from general massive naivety. After being told explicitly now, he's certainly ashamed and horrified at wasting so much time on his own personal dialect of Scots.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> On the internet no one knows you're a (Scots-)illiterate teenager.

This kid apparently didn't even understand that 1:1 dictionary look-ups aren't a form of translation, and definitely did not understand/anticipate the immense damage he was doing. There's plenty of blame to go around, but someone should've stepped in and stopped this before it went so far.

The striking thing is that this person became a main administrator of the Scots wikipedia without vetting. Anonymous/Pseudonymous online discussion/contribution is and always has been an important part of internet culture. But I've never been part of a forum or website where the moderators/administrators retain their anonymity. In the rare cases where they did, there was a good reason (e.g., avoiding embarrassment or sensitive post history), and the admins at least knew _each other 's_ real identities. Maybe Wikipedia needs to have a "divulge your real identity at least to other admins" policy for at least the language-level main administrators of the wiki.

<comment><USER5> > This kid apparently didn't even understand that 1:1 dictionary look-ups > aren't a form of translation, and definitely did not understand/anticipate > the immense damage he was doing. There's plenty of blame to go around, but > someone should've stepped in and stopped this before it went so far.

This is also an illustration of the dangers of "inclusionism" (in the Wikipedia sense [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_i...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_in_Wikipedia)). It took at least seven years for this person to be identified, and in the meantime they introduced a massive amount of garbage, at least in part because resources were spread too thin for a meaningful amount of quality control to be done in the area that they were active.

With Wikipedia's perpetually declining participation, it would make sense for them to drop areas where their volunteers don't have the manpower or interest to maintain.

<comment><USER6> "immense damage he was doing"

What damage is he doing? As a Scot and someone who is rather fond of Scots (which I grew up speaking) I'm somewhat pleasantly surprised that anyone is sufficiently interested to have a go at creating Wikipedia entries!

<comment><USER7> It's like he created the latin wikipedia by converting English wiki pages into pig-latin. It massively misrepresents the language, and when you're talking about a language like Scots that's very little used, and possibly in danger of going extinct, this is massively polluting to it.

What he created isn't a Scots wikipedia, it's a bad parody of one that gets words wrong and is completely ignorant of Scots grammar, while sitting in a position of relative authority.

If you can speak Scots, can you read these as Scots? Does it genuinely seem like it's actually written in Scots?

<comment><USER8> The reddit thread made a great example of "an aw" being used as a substitution for "also", so I'll round that example out to illustrate.

In a nutshell, his dictionary has provided him "also"->"an aw", but it's better translated as "and all" or "as well".

So "I had eggs for breakfast; I had toast also" works as "I had toast an aw" (I had toast as well). But "I also had toast" does not work as "I an aw had toast" (I as well had toast).

"I had eggs for breakfast; I as well had toast"; As a native English speaker you'd find that perfectly intelligible, but jarring.

I'm not Scottish, but I lived there for most my childhood - so I have a reasonable gut for what just feels wrong. And many the examples I've seen so far, look like spam that's been wrung through a thesaurus. The meaning's there but it doesn't make it correct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Apparently the following is the response from the editor. It sounds nice and mature actually. Hopefully this event has snapped them out of the delusion they've been afflicted with.

> Honestly, I don't mind if you revert all of my edits, delete my articles, > and ban me from the wiki for good. I've already found out that my > "contributions" have angered countless people, and to me that's all the > devastation I can be given, after years of my thinking I was doing good (and > yes, obsessively editing). I was only a 12-year-old kid when I started, and > sometimes when you start something young, you can't see that the habit > you've developed is unhealthy and unhelpful as you get older. I don't care > about defending myself, I only want to stop being harassed on my social > medias (and to stop my other friends who have nothing to do with the wiki > from being harassed as well). Whether peace can be achieved by scowiki being > kept like it is or extensively reformed to wipe my influence from it makes > no difference to me now that I know that I've done no good anyway.

</comment><comment><USER10> The fact that it took 7 years to reach this broad a recognition of the issue gives you an idea of how many actual speakers of the Scots language are reading the Scots language Wikipedia.

Or maybe they don't read it specifically because they know it's (linguistically) fraudulent, and now we know the reason why it's that way.

<comment><USER11> The first sentence of the linked post addresses this: "The Scots language version of Wikipedia is legendarily bad. People embroiled in linguistic debates about Scots often use it as evidence that Scots isn't a language"

<comment><USER12> But people were arguing that (i.e. treating Scots like a joke Wikipedia) long before this whole thing. See this discussion from 2005-6:

[https://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collogue:Main_Page/Archive_1#...](https://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collogue:Main_Page/Archive_1#Is_this_real)?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For anyone interested in Scots:

[https://dsl.ac.uk/about-scots/](https://dsl.ac.uk/about-scots/)

I have no idea whether it is a language or not but the Doric version of Scots I used as a child ("loon") is pretty much incomprehensible to anyone not from the immediate area - terrible punishments were inflicted on anyone unwise enough to utter a word of Scots in school!

 _It 's a sair fecht_

Edit: An example of the terrible punishments inflicted by teachers would be a _skelped lug_.

<comment><USER13> I'm from Tomintoul originally and spoke Doric as a kid. When I moved to the central belt no-one knew what the hell I was saying and sadly the Doric was gradually beaten out of me. That said I can still fall back into Doric mode whenever I meet another fellow traveller from the area.

<comment><USER6> Out of interest - did they use loons & quines in Tomintoul - I'm from Portknockie originally.

<comment><USER13> Yes they do. My did still uses quine all the time. For me it kinda dropped off of my vocabulary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Wikipedia could have been an invaluable resource for the struggling > language. Instead, it's just become another source of ammunition for people > wanting to disparage and mock it, all because of this one person and their > bizarre fixation on Scots, which unfortunately never extended so far as > wanting to properly learn it.

How could it have been an invaluable resource for the language? Would actual Scots speakers have used it? Apparently they mostly don't contribute to it. The English wikipedia page on the Scots language says it has <100k native speakers and 1.5M L2 speakers and I'm guessing they're almost all fluent English speakers. How successful would the Scots wikipedia have needed to be actually used as an information resource to Scots speakers given that they can all easily use the extremely actively maintained English wikipedia?

It's maybe unfair to make the comparison to a Walmart that sets up in town and causes all the mom and pop shops to die off -- but when you're the "neighbor" of a giant, how do you compete?

Maybe I don't get it b/c I don't speak a language that needs active energy to protect. But I think it makes the most sense to focus on institutions and organizations that already have an external, mission-driven reason to produce content (e.g. schools, cultural institutions, governments, regional media) rather than trying to dedicate the volunteer hours (even when competent volunteers can be found) to try to produce an encyclopedia that few will have strong cause to use.

(edited to correct a typo)

<comment><USER15> > Maybe I don't get it b/c I don't speak a language that needs active energy > to protect.

I do think you're at least partially correct here, with all due respect. I learned Irish (Gaelic) in school and still use the language a fair bit, though I don't live anywhere near a majority Irish-speaking area and I don't need it at work.

The Irish language is not in the greatest of health, and the need for community-driven content and interaction is very real.

Top-down stuff like TV, radio, books etc are all well and good. They help. But at the same time it's things like face-to-face casual conversation, amateurish podcasts and accessible blogs and memes that make it feel more like a reviving, living language and less like homework.

By necessity that means that you need to include and encourage people who don't have a perfect grasp of the language. And sometimes that means that very incorrect stuff is put out there by people who can't do any better, but that's part of the challenge of trying to save a language from extinction.

<comment><USER16> Out of curiosity, what do you use Irish for? Given that (AFAIK) virtually all Irish speakers also speak English natively, what is it useful for?

(I'm not belittling Irish, btw - I think the effort to keep it alive is super cool and worthwhile).

<comment><USER15> You probably already suspect as much, but it's not about being useful as such, in much the same way that most art and culture isn't particularly useful in the practical sense.

In 1800 more people spoke Irish than spoke Dutch, Swedish, Danish or Finnish. It adds perspective what the value is if you consider what would be lost if another of those languages died back as comprehensively as Irish did, to be replaced by something like English or German.

A whole world of poetry, insults and turns of phrase are opened up to me. I can understand the meanings of place names around the country (Baltimore means "the town of the [Downton Abbey-esque] big house"). It's a rebuttal to the notion that the Irish are really just West English, despite their exceptionalism.

As for how I use the language; I struggle through novels, I listen to Irish language radio and podcasts (I don't watch much TV, though there is an Irish- language station), I talk to my partner in Irish when we want to discuss something private while in public, I talk to other people in Irish when the opportunity arises.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Who at Wikipedia is responsible for fixing a problem of this size?

<comment><USER18> The community as a whole, basically. In practice this will be whoever shows up to the ensuing discussions at "meta wikimedia" and the scots wiki. The results of these discussions will be implemented by the editors tasked with overseeing every Wikipedia (and other projects, like Wiktionary) of every language, such as [https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Interesting how easy to track down this person. They used the same username everywhere and the first Google page shows their previous username which leads to basically everything about that person including real name, location, address etc. I bet some news site will doxx them and make a good story about it.

</comment><comment><USER20> It seems to me a little bit contradictory that modern Scots is often not considered a language but rather a dialect, when at the same time it supposedly is so different from English that merely translating the words with English grammar intact does it a great injustice. As far as I can tell, the grammatical differences are very minor:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Scots#Grammar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Scots#Grammar)

Seems more like somebody is upset that no true Scotsman is the chief contributor to Scots Wikipedia. Either the true Scotsmen must be finding that this guy has done an adequate job, or they can blame themselves for not correcting it.

<comment><USER21> Part of the problem that Scots faces is that there are actually 3 Scottish languages: Scottish Gaelic, Scots, and Scottish English. Scottish Gaelic is similar to Irish, Scots is a descendant of Old English, and Scottish English is a dialect of standard British English. People often conflate Scots with Scottish English.</comment></comment>


Dancing hackers create iLuminate system for performance art - <AUTHOR> http://www.iluminate.com/

<comment><USER2> Hello there, iLuminate hacker here! My partner Miral and I founded iLuminate 2 years ago. It's been extremely fun, both on the technical side (we built wearable embedded hardware from scratch for wirelessly controlling lights) and on the performance side. Miral does both. If you saw America's Got Talent [1] tonight, you may have seen her hacking away on her Mac. She was disappointed they didn't show an over-the-shoulder shot of her typing stuff into netcat. :)

[1] [http://www.nbc.com/americas-got-talent/video/ep-601-team- ilu...](http://www.nbc.com/americas-got-talent/video/ep-601-team- iluminate/1331014/)

<comment><USER3> Just curious - what aspects of the performance was she controlling live? I'm surprised she was hacking away in netcat during the performance. I would think the entire thing would have been completely designed beforehand, and at most during the performance she'd be pressing a button at various pre-selected points during the song to keep everything synched (or something like that ... obviously I don't know anything about this).

Awesome stuff by the way. I happened to be watching America's Got Talent tonight and it was by far my favorite.

<comment><USER2> > Just curious - what aspects of the performance was she controlling live? ... > I would think the entire thing would have been completely designed > beforehand ...

You're right. It's mostly pre-choreographed, with manual cue points for performances involving live music or variable length pauses. But, we do use netcat for manual overrides, for monitoring even pre-choreographed pieces, and for testing the devices and lights. It's pretty damn handy. ;)

> Awesome stuff by the way.

Thanks! Watch for us in the next round!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Introducing iLuminate™, the first patent-pending wearable, wireless lighting > system.

Serious question for the founding team: Why do you think what you do is patentable? It's kinda a hot topic today.

<comment><USER5> They're patenting a specific control system, possibly including protocols, circuits, and/or specialized hardware. It's not like they're patenting EL wire or something :)

<comment><USER2> This is correct, the invention is in the control system / hardware. We are not a fan of software patents.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Good stuff.</comment>